Race for the Oscars

The Motion Picture Academy is as much "academy" as the People's Democratic Republic of Korea is "democratic." But on Sunday night, at the Oscars, the academicians were positively Crimson in the way they immersed themselves (and the rest of us) in a single, iron-willed thesis.

Race. The Oscars this year were about race from start to finish. Intended as a celebration of race--curious word that, "celebration," as only some, not others, are allowed receipt of ethnic kudos--the occasion was a depressing example of how apparent good-heartedness can be the bitter enemy of good sense.

Act I in the Oscars was Whoopi Goldberg, than whom there have been few comperes in history more vulgar. But my irritation with her was not with her apparel or appearance, even though she had taken inordinate care to give visual offense. Instead, it was with her affectation of the role of ethnic outsider. Here was a woman successful beyond every ordinary measure--successful, I'd say, beyond the level of her own abilities--giving the audience some shtick about the world viewed through a black optic.

"Can you believe this campaign?" she said, with her trademark chortle. "So much mud has been thrown this year, all the nominees look black." There were other jokes too, in which blackness configured the punch line, inviting the audience to have a guffaw--but one that had better be laced with guilt, for she, Whoopi, was black, and the majority in the audience were white, so God darn it, she wasn't going to let anyone forget this little black-white thing as long as she was on stage.

So in a segment on "The Lord of the Rings," she elicited painful laughs with an observation that none of the of the Hobbits were black. And, yes, "Gosford Park" . . . there's scope for a black crack there too: Can you imagine a house full of cooks and butlers and chauffeurs and servants--and none of them were black! (No matter that this was England, before World War I. What's history to Whoopi?)

Picture Whoopi on stage, convulsed in a theatrical way by the racial jokes of her own confection, and the mind whirs. Why did she do it? It wasn't harmless; it must have been dreamed up, and rehearsed for days before. Had there been an off-the-cuff remark, I'd have laughed with the rest, but since there's nothing spontaneous about the Oscars--and still less about Whoopi--I can only assume that she was attempting to make a point, using her wit to subvert the smugness of white America, or some such expression that one might find in the editorial columns of The Nation. I, Whoopi, am rich as a golden goose, and still not of you, or with you; I am the pungent reminder of discord, the outsider looking in, then darting out of sight. You can't tame me. I'm a Maroon, I'm Anansi the Spider, I'm Yemaya. Now laugh at my jokes, and never feel peace!





There was more to the racial menu of Oscar night than Whoopi's racial hamming. Take the Oscar for lifetime achievement awarded to Sidney Poitier. Here's a magnificent actor--along with Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda and Woody Allen--perhaps the finest Hollywood has seen, of any race. Yet at the Oscars, in a film of talking heads paying tribute to Mr. Poitier, we had only black actors--Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Cuba Gooding Jr. and others--describing him as a role model, an inspiration. But surely Mr. Poitier was an inspiration not just to black actors. Could they not have had a selection of white ones too, paying homage to the great old man?
I guess not, for that would have ruined the academy's thesis, which was that the time had come for Hollywood--big, bad, white Hollywood--to expiate its racial sins. So a Manichaean presentation of Mr. Poitier's contribution was more useful than a nuanced one, even though a sprinkling of white faces in the tribute might have made the more effective, and noble, point, that Mr. Poitier was the first black man to transcend race in Hollywood.

And Mr. Poitier spoke, movingly, uprightly. His face, now stiff and creased with age, is still as handsome as it was "In the Heat of the Night." Yet he too, as if carried away by the current of the academy's thesis, went slightly overboard, describing his success in Hollywood as good not just for Hollywood but also for America, and not just for America but also for the world.

That last hyperbole, however, I find excusable; what I did not was the camera's tendency to pan to the face of every black man and woman in the audience--as if one by one--as Mr. Poitier spoke, and after he spoke, and whenever anyone on stage mentioned anything black. I must have seen Samuel L. Jackson's face at least 20 times! I didn't see Michelle Pfeiffer's even once. And I'm not being racist when I say I'd rather have seen more of Ms. Pfeiffer.





In the end, as the celebration of race got to its climax, we were given a historic double: Mr. Washington and Halle Berry. I'm not sure theirs were the best performances of those in contention, but there was a certain irrepressible logic to this finale. The night was scripted as a fairytale, a feel-good affair in which black actors were to get their due at last. And they got their due. Let it be remembered.
Yet in singling blackness out for celebration, Hollywood--the academy--did itself, and black actors, a disservice. Once again, it made the point that blacks were different, and apart from the mainstream. One might say that it was a little puzzling--even irritating--that no black actor had won a leading Oscar since Mr. Poitier's in 1963. There is no doubt that racial indifference and even some hostility played a role in that omission. But to think that one cathartic night changes everything, washes away all sins, real or imagined, is folly.

The greater folly, however, was to keep the color-coding intact. The academy, it seems, would have blacks be inspirations only to blacks; everyone else is "mainstream," the place blacks arrive once they "transcend barriers." And this folly is not the academy's alone: After all, wasn't Whoopi saying too, I'm not a part of y'all. I'm black. My jokes are black. Ha-ha-ha, suckers!